Hello my favorite people!

Here we are in April already. Everything is blooming, and I just got cussed out by a stranger for talking too loudly on the phone. ♥️🌸😁

I’m happy to report that I’m 30-odd pages into my new screenplay. It’s rough, you guys, like roughhhh, but it’s slowly shaping into something. It’s not about Antarctic exploration—my ode to the Shackleton book in last month’s letter may have been misleading—but it is about explorers, sort of. And disparate personalities thrown together in very close quarters.

I’m writing parts for Lupita Nyong’o and Rosario Dawson, because why not. Carrie Fisher was a big inspiration for the aging rock star character in the last script, and she carried me through four drafts (no pun intended). (Get it, Carrie, carried?? But seriously, no pun intended.) It helps to hear a very particular voice in my head. Otherwise, all the characters wind up sounding like me.

In other writing news, I joined a group. I will just admit right now... I dread the weekly meetings. We start off by checking in; we’re each supposed to take 10 or 15 minutes to talk about what we’re working on, and it gets dull on this end, lemme tell you.

I say, “Welp. I’m trying to write for an hour every morning before I go to work.” 

And they say, “How’s it going?”

And I say, “Fine. I mean, it’s not any good yet. But...”

And that’s all I have to say, really. 

Then we sit there and write. Which, in the evening? The worst. And then we check in again. I kid you not.

“How’d it go?”

Like, what could the answer possibly be? 

“It went great. I FINISHED my script, actually.”

??

I don’t mean to be an asshole. I really like these women. And each time I go, I come away with some little nugget of wisdom.